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The Black Experience - Coggle Diagram
The Black Experience
Diaspora
Lose Your Mother
“In the archive, I saw only traces of lives interrupted, of lives that left no record.”
Slavery
Saltwater Slavery
“The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering… the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed …: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within.”
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Something Torn and New
“Europe has turned the continent’s linguistic communities into graveyards over which now lie European linguistic plantations.”
Slave Riots
"Prior to 1619 and beyond, there were always examples of defiance, escape attempts, violent confrontations and even some mass insurrections. Yet too often the multi-layered and persistent assaults on the peculiar institution get reduced to a mere handful of topics."
Long War Against Slavery
"Tacky and his comrades were not undertaking a discrete act of rebellion but, rather, fighting one of many battles in a long war between slavers and the enslaved."
Maroon Geographies
Studies from before and after the end of slavery establishing a racist framework of misinformation where Black bodies were seen as property, not people, laying groundwork for current inequities in Black health, impacting everything from pain management to maternal mortality and chronic illness. Healthcare systems today still are affected by this disparity in treatment due to stereotypes and cultural norms embedded into peoples lives.
"Marronage the practices of flight from enslavement and place making beyond slavery took place during the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries across the Americas. Through marronage, enslaved Black people asserted their freedom, evaded slave catchers, and created communities that were physically removed from the dominant slave society."
Slavery had an impact on the black community that many argue cannot be undone. Despite that, efforts to reconnect with the past still happen for many reasons. Some want to learn from the mistakes of the past while others just don’t want what happened to ever be forgotten. Whatever the motivation may be, recovery efforts and the issue of slavery are intertwined.
Fatal Invention
"Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one."
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Keywords - Diaspora
“The African diaspora is, like the nation, an ‘imagined community’ conceived of and performed based on imperfect memories, evidence, and agendas.”
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Blackness
Appropriating Blackness
“Black Americans must come to terms with their own differences within black culture. Indeed, Riggs’s gumbo metaphor for black culture sutures the gap between those who view race as biological essence and those who view race as a discursive category.”
Souls of Black Folk
“One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…”
Keywords - Blackness
"Blackness bears the history of the epidermalization of the alternative. The alternative bears that history in turn, will never not be black, now, whatever else that irreducible and inexhaustible blackness is, or will be."
Black Health
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American Health Dilemma
"Healthwise, blacks once more stand in the lobby of
the bank of justice. Again, they're being handed a check marked "insufficient funds." Nobody knows better than physicians that today's health care is devastatingly effective, corrective, life supportive, and selective compared to 50 years ago."
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Afro-Futurism
"Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro-diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. "
The invented idea that people of different races vary greatly in terms of biologically left enough room for some to claim races were inherently better/worse than others at things. This was then used to justify mistreatment of groups such as Africans. Slavery is an example of mistreatment caused by this invention.
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Recovery
The Question of Recovery
"Recovery is simultaneously a necessary project and yet “essentially impossible” — because archives “whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects.”
Reconnecting
“While reconnecting to Africa, those of African descent were also redefining themselves as a series of communities related yet distinct from each other, a consequence of differing local circumstances and histories.”
"We cannot resolve the tension between recovering archival traces of black life as a means of contesting legacies of racism and exclusion and reading the archive as a site of irrevocable silence that reproduces the racial hierarchies intrinsic to is construction..."
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Black recovery tries to reclaim lives from archives structured by racial violence, while fugitivity theorizes the ways Black life escaped, exceeded, or refused those same structures. Their connection lies in this the very limits that make recovery impossible also reveal the traces of fugitivity. What cannot be recovered is often precisely what was actively fugitive.
Fugitivity
Keywords - Refugee
“Refugee status has become one of the ultimate signs of alterity. It functions as shorthand for
“other”: Outsider. Not from here.
Black fugitivity illuminates how Blackness has never been fully captured by the structures that invented racial categories in the first place. Fugitivity shows that Black identity is forged not only through oppression but also through creative, resistant, and improvisational practices that exceed the archive, the law, and the state.
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